A Little Twitter Developer History

Back in the early days of Twitter, I noticed that several tweets I was seeing showed "via _____" next to the date, which linked to the application that was used to post the tweet. I thought "hey that's a clever way to give credit to applications" and thought it would be a good way to get people to discover the Twitter app I was creating at the time.

Of course since Twitter was still so new, there was no automatic way for this to happen. I managed to track down an email posted to the "Twitter Development Talk" mailing list where someone was asking how to do this.

Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:39:29 -0000
From: "Ricky" <rbo...@gmail.com>
To: Twitter Development Talk <twitter-deve...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: How do you set the source from the API
I am trying to update a status of a user via the methods on the API. I
managed to update my status but it always says updated from web. I've
seen other people update from facebook or whatever so I was wondering
if there is a way that I can customise this label.
...
Anything I can change to set the source here?
Cheers

Al3x, one of the first engineers at Twitter (who was primarily focusing on building the developer platform), replied to the list:

Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:43:14 -0700
From: "Alex Payne" <al...@al3x.net>
To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: How do you set the source from the API
Please email me off-list and I'll set you up with a source link. Thanks.
--
Alex Payne
http://twitter.com/al3x

I thought "that sounds like something I can do," and proceeded to have the following email exchange with Al3x.

"Because I've already got webmentions on my site, Brid.gy worked straight out of the gate--a lovely demonstration of some small pieces, loosely joined." - @adactio on posting notes from his own website: http://adactio.com/journal/6826/